>and so much of the development knowledge will be lost to the sands of time
This is when you put on your Assange mask and start saving documents to leak later. Capitalism is going to eat itself, along with all of our technical and institutional knowledge, unless people put that continuity of expertise before the company or even their own jobs. One of the many Boomer habits that we simply cannot carry on into the future is, "Retiring without passing on what we know because it's less trouble and more job security."
> If you don't accept these conditions, don't take that job in the first place.
Indeed, this article convinced me not to work for Goldman Sachs. Really, the way the story was depicted, it looked like they had the freaking Feds in their pocket. Less powerful firms however wouldn't be nearly as dangerous.
Also, don't confuse keeping a secret vs forgetting the secret altogether. When I take some source code home, I don't spill the secret, I merely remember it. The trade secret has not been violated yet. Though I reckon that putting it in a public svn repository would. So, when G.S. is asking me to not copy anything I have written at work home, it is asking me to forget.
I'll need a whole heap of money before I accept such scandalous terms.
> Life is full of choices.
For now. Depends what becomes the norm later. And I must say, I am genuinely afraid of the sci-fi scenario I have depicted above. One day, we will have these direct brain-computer interfaces, and corporations, if they still exist, will try and have you genuinely forget about the work you have done for them upon departure. It will be like working for 5 years at a firm, going out, and not being more experienced than you were before. This cyberpunk outcome is a very real possibility, and in some ways, it has already began.
But let's speak about right now. We're supposed to have rights we can't waive. Like many forms of freedom: you can't enslave yourself, no matter how much they pay you or your family. 'Cause you know, if it were possible, people would enslave themselves. You'd have to be a die-hard right-wing libertarian to believe it's an acceptable downside for the additional freedom to enslave oneself.
Likewise, I believe the right to remember should not be revocable. Our memories are part of our identity. When we lose them, we lose ourselves. To the extent we can lose them, we must do so freely. Doing it for money is not doing it freely (there are similar arguments against prostitution).
> if your passion involves actively degrading your country's competitive advantage by leaking every info you can to the wide world,
I don't like that mindset. The US Gov steals trillions of dollars a year from the public to fund all sorts of stuff. These black projects alone represent hundreds of billions of R&D dollars, that tech should *belong to the public*.
We pay for it, they work for us (don't they?), we should collectively benefit from it. Instead valuable advancements are locked away in secret hangars. Entire industries are left un-disrupted, all so we can have some edge for a hypothetical war we shouldn't even be fighting anyways.
>> But in this specific field, with regards to safety and security, it needs to be out in the open.
This is one of the horrors of capitalism.
If there's money to be made, you can bet that if someone creates a proprietary protocol, it won't be released and will force other companies to develop their own technology to compete.
Yes, it will drive competition, but I fear that it will spawn a host of different, competing technologies and make the whole industry awash in proprietary technology. In most of those cases, the people who lose are the consumers.
> There has never in all of history been totalitarianism like what is possible now. We are building the technical infrastructure for our own total enslavement.
This is one of the primary reasons that I'm planning an exit from software development. I see most of what we do as being a useless waste, and at worst we're building our own enslavement. I'm fortunate to be working on something harmlessly entertaining, but I want to exit all together and start a business that will actually help people.
The unbounding optimism of technologists is pretty disturbing. We can see for ourselves how tyrannical those at the top of our industry can get, yet we are easily chatteled into helping them because of the paycheck and the prestige. It should become less socially acceptable for us to assist tech zealots who want to involve data warehousing technology and AI into every single problem and facet the world is facing.
> And economies have overcome many revolutions, from iron to industrial, without these programs. Do you have a principled reason why the information age is any different?
I truly hope you are a billionaire, because once your Randian utopia comes to fruition, you will need private armies to protect you against their Blackwaters and Pinkertons. Because they'll come for your assets. Count on it.
Don't believe me? Look at Russia. See what happens when oligarchs challenge the supreme oligarch? Their assets get "nationalized", and they are imprisoned. That's best case. The less significant ones catch odd diseases strangely similar to polonium poisoning...
> the world economy is changing faster than people can be educated
how can people learn if large parts of humanity's scientific and technological feedback/learning loops are commoditized and made artificially scarce by our economic system? especially now that we have digital technology available that could make the storing and transmitting of informational artifacts super cheap.
so i think neither of the two reasons you stated, but because we are living in a black box society. we are being forcefully disinherited by the propertied class.
knowledge laborers who get 2x median income have just been less victim to capitalist gatekeeping, since a few are needed to generate more intellectual property for the propertied class. [2]
>>> There's no such thing as forever, especially if it's run by beings that won't be around forever. The scammy people behind this initiative will all die in hundred years.
> if these people actually cared about people owning their own data, they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described. Instead of asking for money.
The only way human beings can successfully store data (especially symbolic/digital data) for long terms is by creating institutions to maintain it.
Even granite tablet buried in a cave for 10,000 years will require a continuous series of institutions maintain the knowledge to successfully interpret it, otherwise you'll just end up with something like Linear A.
> Information is more generally available. If you want to publish online or create software, nearly every resource is available. The Internet is its own paradigm of value.
I'd claim it's actually harder to be productive and to be exposed to the real problems facing the world. Today all of it is all hoarded, 'owned' and locked away by a small group of people. Just look at Shell oil company accurately predicting the devastating impacts of oil production and use back in the 1980’s, or big co’s burying of the early electric car (shown in ‘Who Killed The Electric Car’).
Instead of the magical wonderful world capitalist firms promise in their advertisements, we live in a single-use non-modular black-box nature-killing hellworld.
There is no universal invitation to follow your curiosity, no modularity and access to non-scarce resources (knowledge), despite us living with the most advanced technology we’ve ever had.
All this knowledge commodification means people are kept from understanding the physics (or just, science, overall) of everyday tools and products, leading to high levels of alienation [1] (not to mention all the mental health effects of all this coercion and domination).
I believe in a future where we can learn anything about anything. A world where we can physically take part in a myriad of different (democratic) open source production systems and processes, throughout our long lives. A world where our material accounting systems accurately reflect real-world scarcity, and not systems that upholds arbitrary laws that make life-saving tools, technology and science artificially scarce (and 'owned' by a very small group of people), and tries to shame and intimidate people for making a copy (e.g. shaming people in campaigns like: "You Wouldn’t Steal A Car. Piracy, It's a Crime") [2].
Today we live in a world where the tools humans need to work together are black boxes owned and created by billionaire property 'owners'. This is why I'm excited about the growth of the DWeb, because it's all about agent centricity. Some projects are starting to enable open apps whose public functions are hashed to create unique app DNA's that can evolve organically as the apps are implemented and used. It enables an ecology of distributed micro-service apps.
We need to take back not just the internet, but the world. This is about creating human-friendly living spaces for all. Bike-able cities. Green spaces and gardens everywhere for kids and adults to play. Not a world where certain types of work are made artificially scarce and tied down to a specific place (e.g. knowledge work in Silicon Valley) because of a violent archaic claim system (the ‘Intellectual Property' system).
> the term "world class scientist" is a bit loaded
‘World class‘ was bad word choice. I mean anyone with a STEM degree from a global north university that provided them access to the resources which are locked away for 99.999% of the working class. Someone who can command a big salary (as they're part of the labor aristocracy), as well as work on exciting research projects (much less alienating work).
> only if technologists seek this wisdom can we ensure human flourishing in the modern technological age.
Or alternatively, keep technologists well away from policy making.
Once the web/mobile/advertising boom finally finishes up (and we are nearly there) and all these things are commodified, then nobody will care about 'the modern technological age' because there will be no money.
> how do we ensure that the people of the world have equality of access to these powerful new tools, and that capitalists don't monopolize it to enrich themselves and exacerbate wealth inequality?
Lol, the model is already locked behind a capitalist entity. It's already too late
>>People who are struggling to get by are not going to have the time, energy, or expertise to comparison shop. And when their identities get stolen because their personal information was leaked by a provider, they're just going to get crushed.
The cost to innovation is too steep a price for the additional safety gained. As it is, we don't live in a safe world either way. We are constantly struggling against the forces of uncertainty.
It is only through innovation that we better enable ourselves to contend with these forces.
Look at all of the web innovation that has arisen over the last two decades. It's given us a significant boost in our ability to manage the world around us.
Restrictive regimes like GDPR inhibit the free flow of action that generates innovation. It's bad bargain.
>>Those proposals of yours didn't happen for a reason: they are not in the interest of the capitalist class, and the way modern markets are set up, capitalists have way more power than other individual citizens.
I don't agree with your classist categorizations, but let's just say there is a powerful special interest that stands in the way of a given political solution.
I'd argue that any effective solution would need to be implemented over the lobbying and resistance of one or more of said powerful special interest groups.
If a political solution didn't need to be implemented over the objections of one of these groups, then I'd argue that it's almost certainly not effective, for one or more reasons.
So I'd say it's better to not implement a political change, if the ideal solution is not viable.
>> The reality is that these early “techno-utopians” were keenly aware of these risks. They founded organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation, not because they were convinced that everything was going to be great – but because they were worried that everything could be terrible, and also because they saw the potential for things to be better.
Yeah, but then Google, Facebook et al started throwing six-figure salaries to CS graduates to steal your data and, well, that's what happened to hackers' ethics and technology morality.
> It is a bit sad to see the smartest engineers in the world all working towards implementing and maintaining the largest spying apparatus in history.
It is inevitable when society promotes "fiduciary duty" and "I got mine" as apex values for corporates and individuals, respectively. Unfettered selfishness cannot get to a globally optimal solution, despite what any free market zealots may tell you.
The collective good is out of fashion - it has been for a long time, TBH, but now it is unapologetically so.
> If they start off with things like that, there' so much magic under the hood, they won't understand how anything works. They don't understand they don't own shit until it's too late.
Bingo. The inevitable rug pull is going to be very, very expensive/catastrophic for a lot of people (though, profitable if you understand the underlying systems).
> These are the things we need to copy- not the technology.
This is only my own subjective opinion: the worst thing that we could copy from the US is their business mindset. It destroys society, states, fair competition, and at the end the core values of capitalism. Their mindset gave them leadership but now is about to destroy their society.
We have to find our own path.
> Second, just because it doesn't describe your government now doesn't mean it won't in the future, unfortunately. Consider examples of a 1920s German, or a 1960s Iranian (the old regime was oppressive too, but in different ways), or a 2000s citizen of Poland.
This is the risk averse argument against certain technologies. If you believe your government won’t change and are willing to take that bet, you can lean into technologies very hard and reap the benefits.
Of course, if you think there may be a day where your government will change and use technologies against you, you could live out in the boonies and never even touch a computer, and thus get no benefits from emerging tech.
It’s a trade off between being at the bleeding edge and being as secure and private as possible. Personally, I have made my decision. Could it be my undoing one day if government decides I’m guilty of everything? Sure, but I doubt it will happen. I’ll take the bet.
> We love the traits of it — the decentralization, its permissionless innovation, the open source underpinnings of it, and the standards part — we love it all. But to enable these changes, we must shift our collective mindset from a place of defending, protecting, sometimes even huddling up and trying to keep a piece of what we love to one that is proactive, curious, and engaged with people out in the world. [...] and seeing how the traits of the past can show up in new ways in the future.
If my US corporate-speak decoder works halfway decently this paragraph reads really scary. When exactly have decentralization, permissionless innovation, open source and web standards become things to remember fondly while you move on? This honesty reads like an admission of defeat.
This is when you put on your Assange mask and start saving documents to leak later. Capitalism is going to eat itself, along with all of our technical and institutional knowledge, unless people put that continuity of expertise before the company or even their own jobs. One of the many Boomer habits that we simply cannot carry on into the future is, "Retiring without passing on what we know because it's less trouble and more job security."
reply